RE: Stepper Motor Controllers

[Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Clarification:

I just remembered that one does not actually comment out the SmartStageName line, rather one sets the value to a blank string.

For example, these are the first few lines for a UTS100CC stage from one of my stages.ini files:

[UTS100CC@XPS-DRV01]
;--- Unit = mm
;--- Configuration_Comment = 
;--- Smart stage name
;SmartStageName = UTS100CC
SmartStageName = 
;--- Motor driver model parameters
DriverName = XPS-DRV01
DriverPWMFrequency = 50 ;--- kHz


Note that I have commented out the line 

;SmartStageName = UTS100CC

and replaced it with:

SmartStageName = 

The purpose of the SmartStageName line is to tell the XPS to read the actual stage model from a chip in the stage during initialization.  This only works with Newport stages of course.  It provides a check that the user has plugged the stages in correctly.  If this line is present, and if the stage model string does not match then initialization will fail.  But if there is a chance that you want to deliberately leave a stage unplugged then setting the SmartStageName to an empty string will allow initialization to succeed even if the stage is disconnected at power-up.

Mark

________________________________________
From: Mark Rivers
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2015 3:18 PM
To: Kevin Peterson
Cc: <mark_a_davis@comcast.net>; tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: Stepper Motor Controllers

That is not true. If you simply comment out the SmartStageName lines in the stages.ini file then the controller works fine with any motor disconnected.

Mark


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 10, 2015, at 3:10 PM, Kevin Peterson <kmpeters@anl.gov> wrote:
>
> One disadvantage of the Newport XPS controller is that the controller
> requires its configuration to match the stages that are physically
> connected.  If one stage is disconnected from the controller, none of
> the other axes will be usable until the unused axis is reconfigured to
> be a dummy axis.  For stable setups this isn't an issue.  For
> frequently-changing setups this can be quite annoying.
>
> Kevin
>
>> On 7/10/15 9:58 AM, Mark Rivers wrote:
>> We have 11 Newport XPS controllers on our beam lines. In my
>> experience they are much easier to configure than the Delta Tau
>> units. They have a user-friendly Web interface, all parameters are in
>> engineering units, etc. There is an EPICS interface to complex
>> multi-axis coordinated motion with detector triggering, and lots of
>> other auxiliary I/O.
>>
>> Mark
>>